Even if you get a standard copy of The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, Unfinished Tales, or anything else, you’ll likely get some form of map. What’s so special about this map is that it’s a lot more concentrated than most of the other ones.
Anyway, the map alone for this book is worth a decent amount of quid, let alone the copy it’s attached to looking as if it was published yesterday - I regularly wear clothes with holes in them, but I know how to look after a Tolkien first edition. It’s India paper, which means that despite being almost 1,200 pages long, the spine is only about an inch wide - it looks like a standard 350-pager, and anyone I’ve ever shown it to thought it was just one book, as opposed to the whole trilogy.
A lot of this has to do with how phenomenally cartographed this world is (writing that term - phenomenally cartographed - made me feel even more wanky than him, tbh).Īs I write this, I’m looking at the supplementary map for my 1969 first edition, first print hardback copy of The Lord of the Rings, which is absolutely my most prized possession.
I’ve always had a particularly soft spot for Mirkwood, especially as it’s depicted in The Hobbit, but the fact remains that there are no boring or basic places in Tolkien’s world. Every square centimeter of Middle-earth is mapped out and teeming with its own special context - from Fangorn Forest to the Mines of Moria, to Lothlorien and Minas Morgul, there’s a case to be made for how any one single locale from The Lord of the Rings could have well been a compelling fantasy world in and of itself. They can be a bit antiquated and uppity, though, and the older I get, the more I can see that the lessons I learned from Tolkien as a kid absolutely were not the lessons he was trying to teach.īut one thing no reasonable person can take away from Tolkien’s legendarium is how cohesive the world he created is. These are my favourite books of all time, mind - I’ve got a whole shelf of first editions and Tolkien’s insignia tattooed on my left shoulder. And although the stories are brilliant when it comes to things like fantasy and friendship, the trilogy is terrified of intimacy outside of bros being bros. The writing can be impenetrable at times, with Tolkien attaching more significance to the lore behind a tree than, you know, telling a coherent story - that’s not to mention the 15-page blocks of Elvish singing, which you need to manually translate using a dictionary at the back of the book.
There are a lot of valid criticisms about The Lord of the Rings. Related: Help, I'm About To Spend Too Much Money On The New Edition Of The Silmarillion I mean, it’s a $15 Risk game board, so I wouldn’t expect it to be 100 percent accurate to the wonderful foldout maps you get at the back of first edition copies of The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings, but also… I kind of get where this guy is coming from. It’s about two lads fighting over a Lord of the Rings map, with the cause of the argument being rooted in the amount of inaccuracies it has, like how The Shire is southeast of the Grey Havens (it’s not) and Bree is north of the Old Forest (it’s also not). I tried to start writing this piece around ten minutes ago, but then I remembered one of my favourite videos on the internet, which, for some reason, was almost impossible to find.